Addled Frat Boy in Chief

GOOD TIME FOR A HEART-TO-HEART CHAT

By Garrison Keillor

Tribune Media Services

As the new Congress convenes this week and Speaker Pelosi ascends to
the rostrum, you have to wish them all well. These are the kids who got
up in school assembly and spoke on Armistice Day and were captains of
teams and organized class projects to do good works, a different breed
from us wise guys who lurked in the halls and made fun of them, and in
the end you want them and not us running your government. Yes, they had
serious brown-nose tendencies and a knack for mouthing pieties, but you
could count on them to do what needed doing. They were leaders. They
weren’t going to swipe the lunch money and buy a keg of suds.

You wonder, however, what this earnest bunch can do when things are so
far out of whack as they are in Iraq. The gangland-style execution of
Saddam Hussein was visible reality, a token of the bloodlust and
violence that swirls around Iraq, where our forces are mired, sitting
targets, aliens, fighting a colonial war in behalf of a Shiite majority
that is as despotic and cruel as what came before except messier.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the limousines come and go, memorandums are
set out on long polished tables, men in crisp white shirts sit at
meetings and discuss how to rationalize a war that was conceived by a
handful of men in arrogant ignorance and that has descended over the
past four years into sheer madness.

Military men know there is no military solution here, and the State
Department knows that the policy was driven by domestic politics, but
who is going to tell the Current Occupant? He is still talking about
victory, or undefeat, like some frat boy on meth who thinks he can step
off a roof and not get hurt. The word “surge” keeps cropping up, as if
we were fighting the war with electricity and not human beings.

Rational analysis is not the way to approach this administration. Bob
Woodward found that out. The Bush who burst into convulsive sobs after
winning re-election when his chief of staff Andrew Card said, “You’ve
given your dad a great gift” is so far from the Bush of the photo ops
as to invite closer inspection, and for that you don’t want David
Broder, you need a good novelist.

Here we have a slacker son of a powerful patrician father who resolves
unconscious Oedipal issues through inappropriate acting-out in foreign
countries. Hello? All the king’s task forces can gather together the
shards of the policy, number them, arrange them, but it never made
sense when it was whole and so it makes even less sense now.

American boys in armored jackets and night scopes patrolling the
streets of Baghdad are not going to pacify this country, any more than
they will convert it to Methodism. They are there to die so that a man
in the White House doesn’t have to admit that he, George W. Bush, the
decider, the one in the cowboy boots, made grievous mistakes. He
approved a series of steps that he himself had not the experience or
acumen or simple curiosity to question and which had been dumbed down
for his benefit, and then he doggedly stuck by them until his approval
ratings sank into the swamp.

He was the Great Denier of 2006, waving the flag, questioning the
patriotism of anyone who dared oppose him, until he took a thumpin’ and
now, we are told, he is re-examining the whole matter. Except he’s not.
To admit that he did wrong is to admit that he is not the man his daddy
is, the one who fought in a war.

Hey, we’ve all had issues with our dads. But do we need this many
people to die so that one dude can look like a leader?

The earnest folk in Congress are prepared to discuss policy issues, to
plant their butts in hard chairs and sit through jargon-encrusted
reports and long dry perorations thereupon. They’re trained for that.
That’s one good reason they’re there and not you or me. But to address
the war and the White House, you’re talking pathology.

It’s time for 41 and 43 to work something out, and they can’t do it by
way of James Baker or Brent Scowcroft. Pick up the phone, old man, and
tell 43 you love him dearly and it’s time to think about sparing the
lives of American soldiers, many of whom have sons, too.

(Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” can be heard Saturday
nights on public radio stations across the country.)

(c) 2007 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved.